World Around Me (WAM) is a useful app that enables you to discover the places around you. It is perfect for travellers and it tells you the places to eat, stay, shop and more.

When you visit new places, you often need to know where you can find places to withdraw cash, where you can eat, where you can fill up your car with fuel, where the best shops are, where public transport can be found, and so on.

The main screen provides access to all these categories of places and more, and there is a colourful photo for each one. Below each of the photos is a bar that slides left and right and it contains subcategories. For example, in the Eat and Drink category are subcategories for restaurants, bars and pubs, and cafes. The Enjoy category has subcategories that include parks museums, movie theatres, and art galleries.

You tap a category or subcategory and hold your phone vertically at eye level. The back camera turns on and you can see a live video feed. Overlaid onto the video are tiles that list the places around you. The camera indicates the direction and the tiles show the places and the distance to them.

This enables you to find places and you can point the phone up the street and see what places are in that direction, or point it down the street to see what’s further down. (It’s an app you would use in cities rather than in the countryside.)

Turn around through 360 degrees and tiles float onto the screen to show what places are in the direction you are facing. A radar widget in the top left corner of the screen shows the location of places around you as dots and it helps you to find the places.

It’s quite clever the way it creates this augmented reality view on the phone’s screen. It isn’t the only app that can do this, but it works well.

Tapping the category heading at the top displays a menu that offers two additional views. There is a Google map view that shows the location of places as pins.

Alternatively, a list view is available that shows a text listing of places. This shows the distance, a score, and a mini compass that indicates the direction to go to reach the place. Tapping a place shows details like the address, opening hours, and phone number. There us a button to call it, a button to get directions using Google Maps, and one to open a browser to visit the website.

In the settings you can set the number of results to 20 or 40, and the radius of the radar/places to search. The distance can be from 100 m to 50 km (31 miles).

The app is available on iOS and Android, and it was tested using a Samsung Galaxy S6, although it should work on most phones with Android 4.0.3 and up. The free version has an advert at the bottom of the screen, but if this annoys you it can be removed by buying the ad-free version, which is fairly cheap (£1.99 in the UK)

World Around Me is both fun to use and very useful when you are in an unfamiliar town or city and want to know where places are located. Many apps are deleted after testing for review, but this one will be kept on the phone.

Title: World Around MePrice: FreeDeveloper: WT InfoTechSize: 25 MBVersion: 2.10.7Android: 4.0.3 and upVerdict: A great app for people that travel.